This Week In Sales: Persona 5 Steals Hearts And Wallets Across Japan

Period: The week of September 12th –  September 18th (2016)

Top-seller: Persona 5 – 264,793 (PS4)

Nintendo 3DS sales: 425

Nintendo 3DS LL sales: 106

Nintendo 2DS – 18,754

New Nintendo 3DS sales: 3,047

New Nintendo 3DS LL sales: 15,808

PlayStation Vita sales: 12,931

Wii U sales: 2,703

PlayStation 4 sales: 96,433

PlayStation 3 sales: 1,099

Xbox One sales: 156

<< Last week’s software sales chart

<< How to read and understand sales

Last week, Japan saw some exciting releases, most notably Atlus’ highly anticipated RPG, Persona 5 on PS4 and PS3, along with Pro Evolution Soccer 2017 and more. Here’s the latest from sales tracker Media Create’s weekly data on software and hardware that sold in the week of September 12 through September 18, 2016.

Starting off is Persona 5, and it comes as no surprise to see it take the top two spots, with the PS4 version at #1 with 264,793 copies sold in its debut, along with the PS3 version at #2 with 72, 974 copies for a combined total of 337,767 copies sold between the two versions.

Here’s a look at how it stacks compared to other entries in the Persona series and their first-week sales:

• (2006) Persona 3 – 116,682
• (2007) Persona 3 FES – 90,369
• (2008) Persona 4 – 192,812
• (2009) Persona 3 Portable – 94,287
• (2012) Persona 4 Golden – 137,076
• (2014) Persona Q – 186,856
• (2016) Persona 5 – 337,767

As you can see, Persona 5 not only holds the current record of the best first week in sales across the series, but it managed to do better than both Persona 3 and Persona 4’s debuts combined. It comes to show how much the Persona series has grown over the years.

Additionally, PlayStation 4 sales have soared this week with 96,433 units sold with the newer slim model, and it’s the most we’ve seen for the console in a long long time. But let’s not forget that the PlayStation 4 console was out of stock for the most part the past few weeks, so we probably had a lot of those who got them for Pro Evolution Soccer 2017 and other recent titles, although it’s safe to assume that the biggest chunk comes from Persona 5  buyers.

As far as other titles go, we have the aforementioned Pro Evolution Soccer 2017 at #3 and #4, with the PlayStation 4 version selling 66,037 copies and 34,502 copies, for a total of 100,539 between the two.

Other new releases include Super Battle for Money: The Ultimate Ninja and Battle Player’s Top Decisive Battle! on 3DS at #8 with 6,590 copies, along with 2K Games’ BioShock: The Collection at #10 with 5,543 copies sold in its first week on PS4.

On the hardware front, we already mentioned the PS4’s huge boost in sales, but we also got a new one with the Nintendo 2DS, which surprisingly leads all the 3DS family consoles with 18,754 units sold last week. Other than the PS4 and 2DS, most of the other hardware numbers floated around the same we’ve seen for the past few weeks.

The top-20 chart for the week is as follows:

Sales data acquired from 4Gamer and Media Create.